Pascal's Pyramid Scheme

7patrissimo31 January 2010 06:56PM

Here's a little Sunday irreverence.  Someone else has probably written this story before, and I'm sure the points have been made many times, but it popped into my head when I woke up and I thought it might be fun to write it out.

 

Last week I was walkin' along mindin' my own business when I met a Christian Minister, who asked me if I'd accepted Jesus as my Lord and Personal Saviour.  "Why I sure think so", I responded, "But...what was that name again?".  "Why, Jesus!" he answered, and began to launch into an account of this man's fascinatin' historical doin's, when I interrupted him.

"Funny you should mention it", I replied.  "I do accept as my Lord and Personal Saviour a man who was born of the blessed Virgin Mary in Bethlehem long ago, and was the Son of God, but we call him Schmesus."

The poor man choked and started turnin' a little red, and warned me in menacing tones that lest I accepted his JESUS, I would burn forever in the fire and brimstone of Hell.  "For sure!", said I, "We Schmistians know ALL about Hell.  After all, we use your same holy text, only we call it the Schmible.  It's got all the same books of Genesis an' Paul an' all that, with all the same verses.  There's just one key difference which makes us Schmistians prefer our religion to yours."

"What's that?", he spluttered.

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Comments (15)
    In response to Normal Cryonics
    patrissimo25 January 2010 01:14:50AM* 1 point [-]

    Your final paragraph is a very limited list of the ways parents can spend money on their children. For example, what if the choice is between spending more money on your current kids (like by signing them up for cryonics), and having more kids? By giving kid 1 immortality, you snuff out kid 2's chance at life. There are more life or not-life tradeoffs going on here than merely cryonics.

    Anyway, there are a bunch of things mixed up in your (understandably) emotional paragraph. Like: what do parents owe their children? And: is cryonics a cost-effective benefit? Both of these links seem somewhat suspect to me.

    I'm still a few million in net worth away from thinking cryonics is worth the cost.

    patrissimo15 January 2010 03:21:16AM1 point [-]

    "On average, nothing ever happens for the first time" is an erroneous characterization because it ignores all the times where the predictable thing kept on happening. By invoking the first time you restrict the reference class to those where something unusual happened. But if usually nothing unusual happens (hmm...) and those who predict the unusual are usually con artists as opposed to genius inside analyzers (is this really so unreasonable a view of history?), then he has a point.

    "Smart people claiming that amazing things are going to happen" sometimes leads the way for things like the Wright Brothers, but very often nothing amazing happens.

    patrissimo25 December 2009 01:26:08PM0 points [-]

    Perhaps if the poll is shared by friends on Facebook, this becomes easy?

    patrissimo25 December 2009 01:22:28PM2 points [-]

    "Robin previously posted (and I commented) on the notion of trying to distinguish correct contrarians by "outside indicators" - as I would put it, trying to distinguish correct contrarians, not by analyzing the details of their arguments, but by zooming way out and seeing what sort of general excuse they give for disagreeing with the establishment. As I said in the comments, I am generally pessimistic about the chances of success for this project"

    I think the method that was taught in my family is better: become an expert on one or more subjects, so that you can know, by evaluating the evidence, which views are correct. Then, judge sources by their accuracy in those areas on which you are expert.

    The method was not explicitly meant for contrarianism, but it works well there. Research some promising contrarian claims (perhaps those like diet & exercise which will most affect your life) so that you have pretty high confidence in whether they are correct. Then evaluate the accuracy of contrarians based on whether their claims agree with your research in those areas, and upweight the other things that those contrarians believe. Sure, you have to be smart enough to be a good evidence evaluator, but, hey, that sounds like us.

    patrissimo25 December 2009 01:19:00PM0 points [-]

    "I've never heard of any surveys like this actually being done, but it sounds like quite an interesting dataset to have, if it could be obtained."

    This would be a really fun dataset! See how many dimensions it reduces to and what the bases are.

    In response to comment by Yvain on Two Truths and a Lie
    patrissimo25 December 2009 01:11:27PM3 points [-]

    But evolution really does make homosexuality less likely to occur. If given a set of biological statements like "some animals are homosexual" together with the theory of evolution, you will be able to get many more true/false labelings correct than if you did not have the theory of evolution. Sure, you'll get that one wrong, but you'll still get a lot more right than you otherwise would. (I read part of a book, in fact, whose title I can't remember although I just tried awhile to look it up, about evolution, from a professor who teaches evolution, and the thesis was that armed only with the theory of evolution, you can correctly answer a large number of biological questions without knowing anything about the species involved.)

    With complex theories and complex truths, you get statistical predictive value, rather than perfection. That doesn't mean that testing your theories on real data (the basic idea behind this post) is a bad thing! It just means you need a larger data set.

    patrissimo06 December 2009 08:09:44PM0 points [-]

    Great question. Seth Roberts has studied this as part of self-experimentation. One of the major issues is finding tasks that don't have too large a learning effect, which somewhat confounds the data.

    Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination

    36patrissimo12 November 2009 07:35PM

    This idea has been mentioned in several comments, but it deserves a top-level post.  From an ancient, ancient web article (1995!), Stanford philosophy professor John Perry writes:

    I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

    The insightful observation that procrastinators fill their time with effort, not staring at the walls, gives rise to this form of akrasia aikido, where the urge to not do something is cleverly redirected into productivity.  If you can "waste time" by doing useful things, while feeling like you are avoiding doing the "real work", then you avoid depleting your limited supply of willpower (which happens when you force yourself to do something).

    In other words, structured procrastination (SP) is an efficient use of this limited resource, because doing A in order to avoid doing B is easier than making yourself do A.  If A is something you want to get done, then the less willpower you can use to do it, the more you will be to accomplish.  This only works if A is something that you do want to get done - that's how SP differs from normal procrastination, of course.

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    Comments (46)
      patrissimo12 November 2009 06:58:14PM5 points [-]

      Do you think that just explaining biases to people helps them substantially overcome those biases, or does it take practice, testing, and calibration to genuinely improve one's rationality?

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